Hydrocarbon Superconductor, Need for Engineers, Body Scanners, and more

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March 4, 2010

Invasion of the Body Scanners Hundreds of X-ray backscatter body scanners were promised to U.S. airports in the wake of the attempted underpants bombing last Christmas. The first of those scanners arrive this month.Read more.

Electric Bacteria In the muck of a Danish harbor, scientists have found evidence that bacteria can make electrical connections by building nanowires over long distances. (Well, they can connect over centimeters, which is a long distance for a bacteria.) The discovery could lead to better bacterial batteries and more-effective drugs.    Read more.

Lasers Get the Green Light What the world needs now is a semiconductor laser that’s good, cheap, long-lasting, powerful, and truly green. Such a device could revolutionize information display, improve certain ophthalmological therapies, and give us affordable televisions with bigger, more dazzling pictures than the best available today. Read about how researchers around the world used gallium nitride to develop a true green laser.Read more.

Video: A Gaming Glove That's Fast Enough for Pros Engineers have always tried to come up with better controllers and input devices for video games, but many PC gamers still use their keyboards. Gaming gloves have always seemed like a good idea in theory, but in practice they could never compete. But now there’s the Peregrine glove, which uses simple conductive strips to replace numerous hot-key commands with simple hand gestures.View now.

Sponsored Whitepaper: Automated DRC Waiver Management Integration of third-party intellectual property (IP) into integrated circuit (IC) designs has always been a potential time trap for IC designers. This paper explains the Calibre Auto-Waiver product, and discusses how the auto-waiver process significantly reduces the time and risks associated with implementing third-party IP.Learn more.

Blogs Risk Factor: $1 Million Prize For Anyone To Prove Cause of Toyota's Runaway Cars Some Toyota owners are still complaining about uncommanded acceleration even after taking their cars to Toyota dealerships for the required fixes. Trying to shed more light on the cause of sudden acceleration, Edmunds is offering $1 million to anyone who, under controlled conditions, can “re-create unintended acceleration in a car and then solve that problem and prove the whole thing” to the company, its CEO announced Tuesday.    Read more and comment.

Automaton: Computers Shown More Creative Than Humans For 20 years, University of California, Santa Cruz, emeritus professor David Cope has been working on software, called Emily Howell, that generates original and modern music. Using algorithms that mathematically mix, recombine, and alter musical combinations, his music can often convincingly mimic the styles of the great classical composers such as Mozart and Bach. That said, his work has generated a hostility from those who believe creativity is something a machine could never have, arguing that only humans can compose music with “liveliness” and “soul.”Read more and comment.

Nanoclast: Getting Value from Nanotechnology in Health Care In a recent article in PharmaTech.com, an interview with several pharma experts indicates that one of the biggest impacts nanotechnology is having is the revitalization of “drying pharma pipelines.” The disparate views in the piece hit on a number of areas that nanotechnology is impacting health care, such as analytical instrumentation or diagnostics.   Read more and comment. Podcast: The Need for Electrical Engineers Washington, D.C., and Detroit have something in common—not enough EEs. How can the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration oversee problems like the unintended acceleration that has forced the recall of millions of Toyota cars, when it has only two EEs and no software engineers? Maybe the U.S. government needs an IT overhaul. Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra announced this week a thoroughgoing review of all government IT projects.Read more. A Hydrocarbon Superconductor Researchers in Japan say they have turned a hydrocarbon molecule found in crude oil into a superconductor. They modified picene by adding certain metals, and the resulting material lost all its electrical resistance when chilled below 18 Kelvin. Read more.